Albania, in recent history, has more often than not, translated their beautiful native language songs into English. In a few cases, this has been successful enough to allow them to qualify to the final, other times, not so successful. This year, Eneda Tarifa was chosen to represent the nation with a song titled Përrallë, however with the language name came a new title, and it’s now called Fairytale. Somehow, we can’t imagine a fairytale ending for Albania this year…
The song, even in Albanian never really caught my attention. I found it really hard to follow on from the melody of the verses, and obviously, it was the first part of the song, so it’s easy to lose interest within the first 30 seconds. The chorus was what gave me hope. Her voice was just so strong, and the lyrics in Albanian so mysterious sounding. Now, in English, the chorus – the saving grace of the song – is cheapened by the kindergarten level lyrics and the horrific beat behind her really amazing voice.
The only thing that this song still has above a handful of others this year is a good voice behind it, but I have a feeling that it won’t be enough to catapult Albania into the final. I’m also interested to see how this will be staged, because I think Albania still has a bit to learn about creating a good visual performance, based off previous years.
I think Albania is lucky to be in the second semi-final, as it’s anyone’s game for the last few spots of the qualifying 10. Saying that, I will be quite surprised to see this in the final, and I think that will be up to the performance on the night.
*UPDATE* S0, this is now officially my guilty pleasure song, and after hearing it performed live at the pre-parties I won’t lie, I enjoyed it. I will update my score just a tad to reflect this slight change of heart. (For those reading this after I change the score, it was originally a 4)
I’m going to give this song a 5.5/10. I certainly don’t think it’s horrible, but it’s just not up to the quality of certain other songs this year, which have proved that Eurovision is now a platform for cutting edge music. This is certainly not cutting edge or modern.
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